Welcome back, we hope you and your team have had a good break over the festive period and are off to a roaring start to 2017. We are excited to tell you about a few of the key features and top stories we've been working on as we've hit the ground running.

This month we are focusing on showcasing the Softools USP, a look into Business Governance and the Gemba walk on a tablet or phone. To get 2017 started we have two very useful new features: email updates for you to keep notified of any changes to your apps or records, and image list fields so you can be more creative with your reports and data entry!

Want to have another app builder in your team or fancy learning yourself? Perhaps a refresher? Join us for an App Builder day at Henley Business School, complete with lovely lunch and river-side views. See dates here.

Business Governance

Apps for the effective governance of the business are taking off as organisations seek to drive performance optimisation and compliance. In the last quarter of 2016 Softools built apps for KPI Scorecards, Visual Management, month-end metrics reporting, and apps for Internal Audit and Compliance Teams. As well as driving significant client value, apps that optimise performance also make solutions much ‘stickier’ and therefore resilient to changes in economic conditions.

Doing the Gemba walk

Assessments and audits for performance optimisation have long been popular, but the trend is now to drive this key activity down into the business operations in the form of daily and weekly ‘walks’ around key activities. Key processes and activities are assessed using structured templates running on Tablets or Smart Phones, where evidence of maturity or non-conformance can be captured in the form of photographs. A new random audit generator also means that audits are less predictable – any area of the business could be chosen for assessment on any day, further driving ownership of performance within operations and a culture of continuous improvement.

Partner of the Month

Turner & Townsend

We are working on a number of client opportunities, where T&T are using the Softools platform to build Apps to offer solutions and to differentiate. As well as enabling their best-in-class Performance Assurance Framework to be deployed across clients in the energy and utilities sectors.

New Features

Email workflow:

Individual fields can have workflow configured so that an email notification is sent out when changes to this field are made. For example, a busy executive can now receive an email or Slack message is a business critical project has turned status RED. The email can contain a direct link to that specific project record and details of that record can be contained within the email such as the record name or description.

This was part of the most recent update, please ask your system administrator to help you configure it.

Image list fields:

In much the same way as select lists are used for managing lists of text based options, we have introduced an image list field. The Image List field allows you to select a set of images / icons to be used as potential values for a field. Each image has an associated text value, which could be numeric or text , in the above example a green tick could equate to a 1 and a red cross to 0. When the user sees the field in a record, clicking the field will rotate around the available options.

Lucky you! This was part of our last update, please ask your system administrator to enable it.

Key Dates

Need another app builder or want to refresh your skills? Get out of the office and come along to the lovely Henley Business School for a day of learning and app building complete with a nice lunch and beautiful river-side views.

Bring your templates to life with a colour and imagery. Our experience has shown that making data entry forms more colourful aids user experience and buy in.As an App builder, you can now add icons to your templates (with zero code) within AppStudio. Icons would usually be context sensitive, but can help with branding too!

This nifty little feature enables the user to click 'forwards' and 'back' between records and will auto-save whilst doing so. This means you can navigate through a list of projects quickly and easily whilst seeing the complete set of data. It is also great for Audits and Assessments – moving from one topic to another with a single click.

When a new version of the platform has been released you will now be prompted to refresh your screen so that you have the most recent version available to you. Through this you will see how we are constantly updating and improving the platform for the benefit of all our users!